Salt Pier

I have followed, with pleasure, Dore Kiesselbach's sinuous poems for several years. Some of them remind me of pythons wrapped around a tree limb above a riverbank. Those make me nervous. Others remind me of a favorite shirt, a shirt one will never relinquish, never. His poems, each one a tiny defibrillator, are a wonder.

As the diver beholds 'a moon dissolved in salt,' so we behold the world transformed in these elegant, rigorous, unsparing poems by Dore Kiesselbach. With the problem-solving logic of syntax, a turkey falls dead from a tree, the duelist's bullet turns a pocket watch to shrapnel, a stepfather works his world of harm. Morally acute and musically distillate, this is a book to celebrate.

[F]ascinating .Kiesselbach is capable of bringing dark comedy into his investigations of the everyday .His knowingly cliched treatment of otherwise neglected subjects, on the other hand, reinforces suspicions about the effect of presentation and the importance of engaging critically with the familiar.

Poems often use a single image—meticulously described and most often from nature—as entry point to more profound territory. . . . [Kiesselbach's] language is compressed; sentences compacted by a geologic pressure to remove unnecessary words, leaving only the most apt.

If 'Salt Pier' is, in part, a study of the irredeemable, it is also an acknowledgement of the earthly redemptions almost slipping out of reach. That touch is possible in the affirmation—a tenderness too resilient to recant.

[Kiesselbach's] an opera singer who holds a note without becoming breathless. Kiesselbach has a stunning way to make the poetic phrase change meaning, and make better each line before and after. A trope that depends on synchronicity is not achieved/arranged by accident. His poetry is filled with green growing things, animals, nature's observances—and because of line lengths—a constant tension."

"Emotionally direct and visually all alike in column-shaped free verse, the poems in this debut from the Minneapolis-based Kiesselbach open up to show startling verbal skills, intellectual depths, and sensory complications. 'Beach Thanksgiving' wheels from seaside scenes into one, then another, sad memory: 'Fire's an assortment of sparks down the beach/ beside which your new family cooks./ Asked to bear a ring,/ you pulled and pulled at your hair.' For an elderly mother, once a gardener, 'Joy's bolted/ in her face to sorrow/ like a pair of shears.' Marital love in the present (Kiesselbach has a particular talent for love poems), what looks like abuse in the past, the cycle of green growing things, the cold of the north, and the warmth of the animal world all inform these investigations of confession and its discontents, of commitments given and withheld, sometimes through stark life story but more often, in a wonderful involution, through symbols contemplated at short remove—in turkeys, for example, whose unlikely dignity rebukes human discontents: 'n fall's/ ballroom they bow/ and straighten, straighten,/ bow, and finish/ with a salad course.'